4.3.1 QUEST
QUEST– (Questioning, Understanding
and Exploring Simulated Things)
(www.nhm.ac.uk/education/
quest2/
English/index.html) – began as part of the
SIMILE project, supported by funding from
the Information Society Project Office of
the European Commission. (The principal
aim of the SIMILE project – Students In
Museum Internet Learning Environments –
was to increase learners’ access to
cultural heritage, as represented by
artefacts, objects and specimens in
museum collections.)
The Museum’s education policy
(www.nhm.ac.uk/education/
policy.html and
see Table 4.2) highlights active learning in
terms both of learner participation and of
the learner making his or her own sense
of experiences. Emphasis is therefore
given to observation and enquiry. In this
context it would not be tenable simply to
display photographic images of objects
together with traditional labels. Unlike
many exhibitions and much of the
educational material in museums, QUEST
is deliberately intended to facilitate learner
decision-making and user choice. Its
approach is essentially constructivist on
both of the dimensions identified in Hein’s
(1995, 1998) analysis of museum learning.
QUEST’s home page presents twelve
objects, familiar and unfamiliar, carefully
chosen to be as representative as possible.
Selecting any object presents it fullscreen,
together with a series of icons giving access to the virtual tools that can
be applied to it. Virtual learners can view
the object from different angles, measure
it, weigh it, magnify it, touch it (for texture
and temperature) and even find out its age.
More innovative, though, are the ‘ask a
scientist’ page (for further questions or
suggestions, rather than answers) and the
‘notebook’. When active, the latter enables
learners to record their observations,
deductions and conjectures – and to share
them with others. Only at this stage can a
page of information be accessed, written in
a discursive style.
So, does it work? Can such an essentially
constructivist approach really facilitate
learning? A pilot study in schools and
online feedback both suggest so. The
thousands of users, with an average dwell
time of 18 minutes, confirm its
attractiveness. But the most compelling
evidence comes from an analysis of the
comments in the notebook. Most
significant is the number of learners who
choose to delay accessing the right answer
until they have
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thoroughly explored the
object and shared in an online debate.
The experience of QUEST does suggest that real learning is possible from virtual
objects, and it is active learning predicated
on discovery rather than merely passive
(Hawkey 1998, 1999, 2000).
4.3.2 Walking with Woodlice
There is a tendency to assume that the use
of web-based learning material is
somehow an alternative to real learning.
One of the features of Walking with
Woodlice (www.nhm.ac.uk/woodlice) is that
it promotes learning not only in the real
(but artificial) world of the classroom or
teaching laboratory but also in the real
(and natural) world of the environment
beyond. The promotion of fieldwork and its
interaction with digital technologies –
through data recording and analysis – is a
key element of the project. And, although
the museum can call upon the leading
experts in the field, it is less concerned
with approving and validating the findings
than with encouraging participants, having
submitted their own data, to join in
analysing and commenting on the results.
(Hawkey 2002)
4.3.4 MOLLIS (www.molli.org.uk/)
Museum Open OnLine Learning Initiatives
(MOLLIS) have been developed in a
partnership between the University of
Exeter and local museums (Dillon and
Prosser 2003). Learning activities are
analysed as a series of dynamic processes;
each is a discrete educational entity, but
every individual’s experience arises from
a unique and complex combination of
them all:
• information exchange – facts and
constructs that can potentially be
integrated into a context
• skills application – ability to perform
actions
• knowledge construction – integrating
new information with previous learning
• social interaction – reciprocal action in
exchanging or challenging ideas
• self-expression including beliefs and
creativity.
Collectively, these processes amount to
the construction of meaning in the gap
between the object and the individual. The
web-based learning community is a weak system,
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